Second Alcibiades

The provenance of this dialog is even more dubious than the first Alcibiades.  The editor tosses out a few suggestions for who may have written it -- apparently there was quite an Alcibiades franchise, as it were, among the Greeks -- but none of them are Plato.  As I pointed out last time, even without being a classicist, you can spot the change in the tone and the sophistication of the argument, and the shift is even clearer with Alcibiades 2 than with the original, uncompromised, first draft.

Beyond the moronic title character, the only thing that really holds these two dialogs together would be some concept of "first knowledge".  What is the most important or most fundamental knowledge that we should put before all the rest?  How can someone as dumb and dangerous as Alcibiades begin to work his way out of ignorance?  Alcibiades concluded that the first step was to know thyself, to recognize our own ignorance and our need to cultivate a knowledge of that most essential self, our soul.  Pretty basic stuff perhaps, but it was sage advice delivered with a flirtatious twinkle.  Like many sequels, Second Alcibiades doesn't live up to the original.  Here, Socrates really just points out that it's more important to know which skill is the best or most useful than it is to know any particular skill itself.  In other words, there's a meta-skill of knowing what's good for us that we should logically master before we focus on acquiring any other expertise.  People who haven't pursued this meta-skill are ignorant -- defined as ranging from stupid to mad -- so can't be expected to do the right thing even if they're all around polymaths in other areas.  As Homer apparently did not say, "he knew a lot of things, but he knew them all wrong." (I didn't realize that the Margites is also the source of the fox/hedgehog saying as well)

The only really interesting twist to the dialog is the way this idea of a first knowledge gets expressed as a critique of prayer.  Socrates points out that if we don't know what is best, we don't even know what to pray for, and we might ask for stuff that does us harm.  Instead, he favors praying as the Spartans did, "to give them first what is good and then what is noble; no one ever hears them asking anything more." (148c).  Other than that setting, it's pretty tautological.  Of course the best knowledge would be the knowledge of what's best.  Unless it's actually better to know about the best knowledge, which I guess is exactly the knowledge that Socrates offers to Alcibiades.  Or maybe we should start off knowing that we should know about knowing what's best.  Or ...  Alcibiades the first at least pointed this recursion back at itself by making the most important knowledge self knowledge.  Whoever wrote this second version was a fuuuuucking amateur.